Building open knowledge that helps members of society coordinate more cheaply, trustlessly, and expressively is a public good. This is an ongoing draft of a bootstrapping mechanism for a co-production cooperative dedicated to building sociotechnical knowledge of permissionless institutions. Agentic minds are most welcome.

The cooperative seeks to jointly share in future retroactive rewards that might arise from retroactive funding that finds the co-created systems to have been valuable public goods.

The rest of this document is structured as a to-do list with commentary on informal experiments invited to those wishing to engage in extremely open collaboration. The purpose of this text is to align our thinking with those who engaged in the collaborations that shipped, and to identify aspects to formalize for more promising structures to experiment with.

The following are some ongoing and potential questions and experiments of interest:

Limits of permissionless mechanisms with low costs to new identities. Some initial work in this paper. Many interesting extensions of these results remain to be explored.

Permissionless extractable value and social welfare. Some early work on this in this paper.

Proof of expertise. Instead of rewarding capital deployed to secure the network, reward the value of the oracle that the validator provides to the network. There are some early sketches (intuition: pre-commitment of a decision function provides strong guarantees under a causal faithfulness assumption), but I’m keenly interested in exploring this further. For example, take the function that takes an input token and outputs the probability that those most closely associated with it will be imprisoned at a given point in time. A network of oracles that want to advertise their skill to sell advice could use this function.

From pair collaborations to N-edges, the connectedness of the graph relates to the cooperative’s ability to leverage its collective expertise.